The free Alexa Voice Service (AVS), the same service that powers Amazon Echo, is now available in developer preview to hobbyists and hardware makers who want to integrate Alexa into their connected devices. AVS enables your customers to speak to Alexa through the microphone on your device and Alexa will respond through the device’s speakers. With the developer preview, you get access to a collection of self-service tools, documentation, and APIs and code samples to enhance your device and delight your customers with new voice experiences. Alexa includes access to information, music, audiobooks, news, weather, traffic and more, including any custom skills you create using the Alexa Skills Kit to differentiate your device. Learn more about the developer preview.

Take Advantage of the Alexa Voice Service

Use AVS to extend your hardware’s capabilities and interact with your customers in new ways. Benefits of AVS include:

Create Frictionless Interfaces for Your Customers. Allow your customers to control your device in more intuitive ways with a natural language voice interface. By integrating AVS with your device, your customer no longer needs to get out their phone, find an app, and use their thumbs to invoke a command. All they have to do is ask via the microphone on your device.

Scale Quickly in the Cloud. AVS is cloud based and scales as your needs scale. You don’t need to worry about provisioning hardware and managing infrastructure to power your voice experience.

Integrate Easily. No experience with voice recognition or Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is required. Using AVS, add Alexa to your device in just a few hours. Leave understanding human speech to us and focus on your differentiated value add to customers.

Build for Free. Using AVS to power speech experiences on your devices is completely free.

It's Easy to Get Started

To get started with the Alexa Voice Service on your device, we recommend you review the following materials in this order:

Read the Getting Started Guide, which details how to call the Alexa Voice Service cloud API from your device.

The Alexa Fund

Amazon is investing up to $100 million to support developers, manufacturers, and start-ups of all sizes who are creating unique and innovative experiences designed around the human voice. Learn more here.

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Being a great coder today requires many skills and habits beyond the code itself. The Code Writers Workshop is a one day event that tackles many of these areas through a series of talks, panels and lessons learned from some of industry's most successful developers. This event is intended for developers across languages and platforms with an interest in getting all they can out of the great profession of coding.

We’d like to invite the Amazon developer community to submit talks for the upcoming Seattle Code Writers Workshop taking place October 16 at the Impact Hub. There is a long list of potential topics, but for some inspiration here are a few areas of interest; Time management, team success, industry stewardship and contribution, documentation, nutrition & wellness, technology strategy, overcoming challenges such as motivation, fear, disappointment and conflict resolution. Presenting, speaking, negotiating, licensing and more are all in bounds.

One of our keynote speakers will be Dr. Tom Love, a UW PhD and co-inventor of Objective-C, the language that runs on all Apple products. It’s going to be an incredible day in Seattle October 16th.

We recently updated the developer portal device targeting capabilities to include targeting for the most popular Android devices including the Nexus 5, 7, 10, HTC One, Shield Tablet, Galaxy Nexus, Sony Experia Z, and the Motorola Droid Razr HD to name just a few. Developers can now look at the list of supported, excluded and unsupported devices to quickly see which devices are compatible with their app, and if their app manifest settings have filtered out any devices.

To make sure your app or game is available on as many devices as possible, you need to optimize the targeting via the developer portal and your Android manifest. Android developers know that getting on as many devices as possible is key for a successful app launch. More devices = more downloads = more $$$. Consequently, most developers are aware that careful construction of an app’s manifest (i.e. the AndroidManifest.xml file in the .apk package) is essential for targeting compatible devices, while avoiding devices that would cause their app to perform poorly.

However, there are a few common mistakes developers make with manifests that can cause device targeting to be too restrictive or too permissive when determining an app’s compatibility. Here are 3 common mistakes that we see: Read More →

In our new short take gamedev video series, Rosie Linder, CEO and Co-Founder of Stockholm-based Peppy Pals, shares her journey from being a single mom of two girls with no coding experience to the CEO of an award-winning gaming studio.

Publish your first app to the Amazon Appstore by August 16th, and we’ll provide you with a $100 promotional credit towards an ad campaign on Advertise Your App. Advertise Your App helps you promote your app to millions of users on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network.

Thursday, July 23rd

Making a Great Amazon Fire TV Game From a Touch Screen Experience

Rhys Lewis shared his experience shifting from AAA to indie development earlier this year with the release of Star Drift. Combining slick shooter gameplay with intuitive one-touch controls, Star Drift quickly became a fan favorite when it debuted on iOS in February. Not long after, Lewis brought the game to Fire TV.

Today on Twitch: We Are Joined by USC to Discuss Game Design and Their Game Development

Developer Evangelist, Paul Cutsinger interviewed University of Southern California’s Sam Roberts and Gordon Bellamy around game design, game entrepreneurism and their game development program.

Want Amazon Developer blogs delivered to your inbox? Stay in the loop on the latest industry best practices, Amazon promotions, and new launches by subscribing to our weekly blog summary here. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

On Thurday’s installment of our live dev show we welcome University of Southern California’s Sam Roberts, Assistant Director and Gordon Bellamy, Visiting Scholar. We’ll be discussing game design, game entreprenuerism and their game development program. We’ll also have a no holds barred critique of our concept game “Planet Destroyer"

After working on classic Nintendo franchises like Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country, Rhys Lewis made the jump from AAA to indie development earlier this year with the release of Star Drift. Combining slick shooter gameplay with intuitive one-touch controls, Star Drift quickly became a fan favorite when it debuted on iOS in February. Not long after, Lewis brought the game to Fire TV and in the process created a stellar example of how developers can adapt a touch screen game for a big-screen living room experience. Read More →

If you've never published an app to the Amazon Appstore, now is the perfect time to join! Most Android apps just work on the Amazon Appstore, but it’s not always easy being the new guy. That’s why for a limited time, we’re helping drive impressions and installs for developers that publish to the Amazon Appstore for the first time.

Publish your first app to the Amazon Appstore by August 16th, and we’ll provide you with a $100 promotional credit towards an ad campaign on Advertise Your App. Advertise Your App helps you promote your app to millions of users on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network. Ads are shown to users within the United States, depending on app compatibility. Read More →

Ever wondered how to create a game with no coding experience? Whether to build a native app or a web app? What monetization model to choose for your business? Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, is a new video series created by Amazon Appstore in which successful apps and games developers answer your questions in under 90 seconds.

In this edition, Rosie Linder, CEO and Co-Founder of Stockholm-based Peppy Pals, shares her journey from being a single mom of two girls with no coding experience to the CEO of an award-winning gaming studio. Read More →

Join us on Monday August 10, 2015 at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco for a full day of learning and activities. Our Developer Evangelists will share tips and best practices on how to build, optimize and monetize your apps and games. The developer day is complimentary and doesn't require Casual Connect event badge access. Read More →

We announced the Amazon Mobile Ad network is offering a limited time opportunity to earn a guaranteed $6 CPM for interstitial ads on qualifying iOS and Android apps through November.

Tuesday, July 14th

From the Twitch Stream: Starr Long from Shroud of the Avatar on fully transparent game building to fully engage the player (Planet Destroyer Episode 150707)

Developer Evangelist, Paul Cutsinger shared some episode highlights from his interview with Starr Long, executive producer for Shroud of the Avatar.

Wednesday, July 15th

Announcing The Amazon Cross-Platform Mobile Ads API

We announced that our new Amazon Cross-Platform Mobile Ads API Plugin is now available for Unity, Cordova, Adobe AIR and Xamarin.

Thursday, July 16th

Announcing the Alexa Skills Kit Knowledge Base

To help jumpstart your Alexa Skills Kit development we have created a knowledge base of answers to top questions posted in our Alexa Skills Kit forums. If you are just starting out, this list is a great place to get quick answers to common questions around building Alexa skills you may have.

Want Amazon Developer blogs delivered to your inbox? Stay in the loop on the latest industry best practices, Amazon promotions, and new launches by subscribing to our weekly blog summary here. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.